Editorial: Will foreign applause count in U.S.?

Well, it seems they take Barack Obama seriously abroad, even if he may have some work still to do on that front at home.

Well, it seems they take Barack Obama seriously abroad, even if he may have some work still to do on that front at home.

GOP challenger John McCain repeatedly dared Obama to go to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to polish his foreign policy bona fides, which he did and then some, traveling to meet leaders throughout the Middle East and western Europe, speaking to enormous crowds and dominating the headlines in this country last week.

In a nutshell, McCain asked for it, he got it, and now he whines about it, criticizing Obama for merely playing politics and for skipping a chance to meet with wounded U.S. soldiers at a hospital in Germany. And if Obama had visited the vets - despite the reservations of the Pentagon, despite doing so before at Walter Reed - McCain would have lambasted him for politically exploiting some vulnerable GIs.

A real leader doesn't want it both ways. A real leader doesn't betray envy, doesn't carp when his own campaign strategy backfires on him. Whose fault is it that Obama went to Germany and McCain went to a German restaurant in Ohio? McCain will have to do better than this.

Obama will have to do better, too, impressive as the crowds were, especially in Berlin, where they were estimated at 200,000. Most of those folks are caught up in the rock star stuff. Obama has a tougher audience in the heads of state he'll have to deal with if the American people elect him to occupy the White House. Not all of them were swooning, as some found in him a certain lack of specificity.

"The Obama who spoke tonight did not put all his cards on the table," said a representative of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Some are wary of what they perceive as Obama's protectionist leanings on trade. Others fear he won't bring the change he promises in the global war on terrorism. Some worry he'll get too cozy with Israel, others not friendly enough. Many just want a more concrete sense of where he stands on some critical global issues.

Obama gets some of the same criticism in the U.S., and it's a hurdle the rookie senator carrying a fair amount of blank-slate baggage will have to clear as this campaign nears its sprint to the finish.

That said, on balance Obama started to legitimize himself internationally last week. Whether he did himself any favors at home remains to be seen. No contemporary politician has a better command of the symbolic than Obama - the photos from Berlin were extraordinary. Some of the most memorable and sometimes effective leaders of the free world have had that. Ronald Reagan certainly had a sense of it. JFK did.

Beyond that, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote over the weekend that "many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them." That's no small thing following eight years in which America's international reputation has suffered under the likes of a war of choice in Iraq, the seeming hypocrisy of the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and other go-it-alone policies on the environment and other issues.

How America is perceived in the world matters, because powerful as the U.S. is, it isn't powerful enough to stir the global pot all by its lonesome.

Both candidates have their feet firmly planted on American soil now. We're ready for the meat of this campaign to begin.